Louisiana’s Supreme Court recently ruled that the state’s new private school voucher system can continue, despite a fervent outcry to halt the program from many public agencies and private organizations. In fact, in November 2012, Supreme Court Judge Timothy Kelley declared the funding formula for the voucher program unconstitutional.

The case was originally filed by the state’s teacher unions and 43 school boards, which asserted that the voucher program improperly allowed money derived from the state’s school funding formula to be diverted from public schools. However, the Louisiana Association of Educators (LAE) argument that the program violates the state’s constitution is still very much alive. “This is about protecting the constitutional rights of all Louisiana’s school children—not just a select few,” argued LAE President Joyce Haynes.

As it stands, the program provides cash vouchers for low- and middle-income families, allowing them to choose private, or even religious schools for their children, to help allay costs. In 2012-2013, the controversial program served up to 5,600 students with 118 private schools receiving students from 207 school districts. As students and schools taking part in the new system move forward with vouchers, the key question that remains is how the underlying issue of the pervasive resource inequality in our public schools will be addressed.

The Case Against Vouchers

Over the last 20 years, key players in the education sector have championed the need for public schools to better serve poor students, particularly those of color; and many of them are vehemently opposed to voucher systems.  These detractors have leveled serious objections to the strategy, suggesting that implementing voucher systems would ultimately lead to lower quality public schools and increase achievement gaps.

But why shouldn’t parents struggling to put food on the table get support to send their child to what might be a better school?  There are multiple reasons why well-respected opinion leaders and reformers are failing to support the voucher systems already in place in several states.  Here are three of the most compelling among them:

1. The Private Is Better Assumption. Inherent in a lot of the arguments made for the voucher system is the fairly resilient belief that private schools are better than public ones.  Despite the apples and eggplant nature of the comparison, most analysis that controls for the variables that matter, like socio-economic status and race, demonstrates that public schools either outperform or perform as well as private schools in elementary and middle school grades.

“We have to be careful not to succumb to this nonsense that a public system is inherently flawed and that therefore we have to turn to the marketplace for solutions. I’ve never in my entire life seen any evidence that the competitive free market, unrestricted, without a strong counterpoise within the public sector, will ever dispense decent medical care, sanitation, transportation, or education to the people. It’s as simple as that.” - Jonathan Kozol, Author

The prevalence of bad press about public schools and the relative silence around private school performance generally leads the public to an erroneous conclusion. However, in the presence of myth-breaking data that finds private school students do not necessarily meet with better high school and college success, the nature of the conversation must shift.

Further, while we can largely agree that parents should have choices about where to send their children for schooling, it may be more interesting to ask what parents are actually choosing when they take advantage of vouchers. In alignment with the data, it might not just be a better school they are seeking, but rather a better class of peers for their child.

2. The Need for Systemic Reform.  Vouchers clearly offer opportunities for a relative few students from middle class and poor families to have greater choices about their education. Still, the need remains for school districts to systemically transform themselves into organizations that can create high levels of performance for all kids. Vouchers do nothing to support that kind of change.  For example, some 500,000 students are now in low performing schools across Indiana.  Having a small percentage of students served in private schools using public dollars, estimated at approximately 9000 this year, does little to improve the overall statewide challenge of serving the remaining 491,000.

“Voucher proposals take many forms, and some are designed to deliberately disguise the basic realities that will result over time. The best students will be skimmed off — those whom private schools find desirable for their own reasons. Since families will have to make up additional costs, those in the upper-and middle-income brackets will be helped the most — as long as their kids don’t have personal, behavioral, or educational challenges that cause the private school to pass them by.” - Kweisi Mfume, President and CEO of the NAACP

The Titanic comes to mind. Vouchers are a life preserver providing a potentially lifesaving option only for those who manage to get one. We might wonder then if those who cannot get those lifesaving options are justly denied the possibility of a different future. The larger question remains of whether or not the resources used on the life preservers could be better utilized doing something to change the course of the entire doomed vessel for the betterment of everyone aboard.

An analysis of several studies in various states offers a counter-point by finding mostly positive effects on students and districts as a result of the implementation of vouchers. The emerging evidence shows that in some cases, effective targeting of voucher-like systems can improve entire districts. When carefully executed, vouchers can improve the quality of offerings in traditional public schools by providing the impetus to make systematic programming decisions that reflect what parents who would otherwise opt out of the public school system value. In this scenario, the voucher recipients become leading indicators of what is needed within the school marketplace, helping to identify which changes in district programs would be welcomed. It seems from this analysis that a school district paying close attention to parents who exercise the voucher option, and acting to develop programs of interest to parents seeking specialized programming, may provide a pathway to mutually beneficial outcomes.

3.  Inequality of resources.  If one believes that the most challenged schools are poorly resourced, then the voucher strategy would seem to exacerbate the situation by removing already scarce resources from public schools while expending them elsewhere.

“The real equity issue is that there are radically unequal allocations of funds to schools. These unequal allocations routinely disadvantage schools in central cities and in poor rural areas. Private school choice, as it is currently being proposed, is a smokescreen to avoid tackling this real equity issue.” - Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Educationat Stanford University

For example, in Indiana, the families of approximately 9,000 students are provided with a voucher valued at about $5,000. In the larger context, that is a significant amount of money. Statewide, it amounts to a $45 million transfer away from public school systems. The 9,000 vouchers granted this school year are to families from 207 school districts, with Indianapolis Public Schools taking the greatest hit to its budget. 1,262 of its students have received vouchers totaling over $6 million.

The question at hand is whether or not the district’s basic systems of support will be eroded in this scenario. The fact that Indiana’s cap on vouchers will be lifted next school year makes this a serious concern. Imagine then if the number of students receiving vouchers doubles or triples, and a district like Indianapolis, already gaining traction in their efforts to serve students, effectively finds itself with an annual budget drain of monumental proportions. Imagine if the number is $18 million from this one system two years from now. Wouldn’t this mean school closures, layoffs, or ending programs?

Some voucher proponents argue that parents who vote with their feet would pressure districts to improve in order to preserve their markets and resources. That the erosion noted here would not happen if the district adapted effectively to a demand for better quality schools might also be something to consider.

While most issues in the education reform landscape can be an exercise in unnecessarily polarizing discourse, there is clearly an equity issue still at play when it comes to the voucher conversation.  Still, there is agreement between those who support vouchers and those who oppose them around the very real fact that each child deserves an education that prepares him or her for an excellent future.  The disagreement is about a tactic then, not about the goal.

It is possible that there are ways for well-executed voucher systems to be a part of a suite of reforms that transform entire systems to higher performance.   The results are not yet in on the veracity of the voucher option, but we look forward to what transpires next in service to better schools and better educational outcomes for all students—vouchers or not.

Derek S. Mitchell, Ph.D.

Chief Executive Officer

dmitchell@partnersinschools.org

415.824.6196 x 109

At Partners, we often describe our approach as working shoulder to shoulder with teachers and leaders. Fostering collaboration is at the heart of our work, and while individual teachers can and often do achieve tremendous student learning gains, we believe in the power of effective teams to help provide greater impact on student learning.

Effective teams are best able to learn from one another and have tremendous impact on student learning when they come together regularly to plan instruction strategically. At Partners, our work is guided by the following questions (Dufour, 2004):

Who are our students and how can we most effectively teach them? 

In order to be most effective, teams must know their students and be able to select from a broad repertoire of effective practices in order to design lessons that will meet their students’ needs.  In order to do this, teachers work together and use a variety of strategies to understand their students’ strengths and challenges.  Once firmly grounded in a deep knowledge of their students, collaboration provides a space for teachers to be active learners. They are able to examine and refine their practice continually by reading professional articles, observing their peers, discussing important questions of equity, and using evidence of student learning to reflect on the effectiveness of their instruction.

What do our students need to know and be able to do?

Effective teams have a solid understanding of grade level standards and of literacy development–an understanding that includes a broader recognition of why and how these skills are important for all students.  Based on this knowledge, teacher teams set clear goals for student learning and break those goals down into monthly and weekly objectives in order to ensure that every lesson and activity is connected to a larger purpose while still holding specific student outcomes in mind.

How will we know if our students have learned what we taught?

Effective teams use a range of thoughtfully selected assessments to monitor student learning.  In order to ensure that their high expectations are shared and concrete, teachers collectively define a standard of rigor and work together to select or design common ways of checking to see whether students have mastered the skills and standards that they have taught. They then carefully examine those results in order to inform their own learning and use these results to guide long-term planning.

How will we adjust based on evidence of student learning?  

Based on the results of regular formative assessments, student work, or other assessment data, teachers adjust their lessons in order to ensure that all students master priority standards and skills.  When students fall behind, effective teams use diagnostic assessments to identify skill gaps and guide instruction.  They then plan together to address skill gaps, re-teach key skills and ensure that all students are able to access and master grade level standards.

Developing routines to enable collaboration

Partners has collaborated with Paul Revere K-8 College Preparatory School in the San Francisco Unified School District for the last three years. The Revere student body includes 59% Latino students, 16% African-American students, 47% English language learners and 71% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch.

Over the past two years, Revere has experienced phenomenal growth in student achievement.  Between 2010 and 2012, Revere has grown by 25 percentage points in the percentage of students scoring Proficient or Advanced on the California Standards Test-English Language Arts (26% to 51%).  In the same time period, Revere’s API score has increased by 98 points, from 655 to 753.  In 2012, this dramatic student achievement growth further led Revere to meet all of it’s Adequate Yearly Progress criteria for the first time ever.

The initial focus of our work at Revere was on the instigation of a collaborative culture that would underline our success. Partners’ efforts also focused on important components such as analyzing formative and benchmark data and backwards mapping a standards-based curriculum in order to meet student achievement goals, but key to our success was enhancing effective collaboration at all levels.

When teams are functioning at their best, they develop routines and habits that enable them to more efficiently perform essential work.  For example, Schmoker (2006) describes the power of a focused, efficient, weekly meeting where teams select a standard that students have not yet mastered, develop a mini-assessment for that standard, and build a rough lesson outline to guide teaching.  At Revere, a regular team meeting format was used to do three basic things:

1. Look Back: Teachers examine student work and reflect on how their teaching helped or hindered students’ mastery of a particular skill or standard.

2. Look Forward: Informed by their students’ rate of progress toward goals, teachers look at what is coming up in their curriculum, adjust their long term plans, and select a focus for their work that week.

3. Plan: They work together to plan a lesson or series of lessons focused around a particular skill or standard, at times seeking to utilize key teaching strategies and practices that are the focus of the team’s professional learning.

This ongoing dialogue about practice is the platform that pushes teachers to develop their craft to a level of quality and effectiveness that they would be unlikely to attain on their own. In a trusting, collaborative setting, teachers can support one another to take on new practices, challenge one another’s assumptions and hold one another accountable to the highest level of expectations for their students.

Partners supports the development of strong, collaborative teams where teachers are empowered to learn, reflect and plan meaningful and effective instruction that will equip all students with the critical literacy and problem solving skills they need to succeed.

On January 28th, The Economic Policy Institute released a report in which researchers Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein encouraged a more optimistic view of the American education system. Their findings, which are based on recent analysis of international achievement data, conclude that U.S. social class inequality is an important consideration when making worldwide comparisons:

“Because social class inequality is greater in the United States than in any of the countries with which we can reasonably be compared, the relative performance of U.S. adolescents is better than it appears when countries’ national average performance is conventionally compared.”

Many have interpreted this as good news, an encouragement that we are not as bad as we may have been led to believe, for example, by international rankings of OECD countries. When last reported, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading and 25th in math overall. It seems that when the playing field is relatively leveled, however, in part by re-estimating averages with consideration for the large number of disadvantaged students in the U.S., we rise to 6th in reading and 13th in math—a sure sign of progress.

Interestingly, however, the report notes:

At all points in the social class distribution, U.S. students perform worse, and in many cases substantially worse, than students in a group of top-scoring countries (Canada, Finland, and Korea). Although controlling for social class distribution would narrow the difference in average scores between these countries and the United States, it would not eliminate it.

While some may nonetheless be looking to celebrate the upward movement in U.S. rankings on the international education stage, one caution: we should not lose sight of the fundamental fact of the disproportionate number of poor students scoring poorly across America. Or, more plainly, that our systems for resourcing public schools leave families living in poverty at a distinct disadvantage and the achievement gap remains.

Significant gaps for Latino and African-American students are evident in virtually every measure of achievement. Despite decades of public policy aimed at improving the overall achievement of our most challenged students, research continues to show that on average, low-income students of color remain up to four years behind their peers. The data moved McKinsey (April 2009) to report that our failure to close the achievement gap provided us with, “the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.”

On this point, the report authors argue for revisions in how test data is used, advising policy makers to refrain from myopic interpretations, particularly of data regarding disadvantaged children. They make this suggestion because, “…an analysis of international test score levels and trends shows that in important ways disadvantaged U.S. children perform better, relative to children in comparable nations, than do middle-class and advantaged children.” Quick judgments about test score data and a lack of willingness to look at progress over time can lead to unnecessary and potentially harmful reforms.

The real question for us to consider is to what degree we allow ourselves to be encouraged today by comparisons made with other countries, and to what degree we focus on the problem at hand. With school and life success in America now largely measured by whether or not a student can read proficiently by third grade, there is much work to be done. Research reveals that while 16 percent of children who do not hit the third-grade reading proficiency mark fail to graduate from high school, this figure rises to 31 percent for African-American students and to 33 percent for Latino students.

At Partners, we believe that academic success for students of all economic and racial backgrounds is not only possible, but necessary to create a just, vibrant and thriving global economy. Perhaps once we have achieved that we can look to see where we rank overseas and have a well-deserved celebration.

You may know that California ranks 49th overall in student investment by state in this country, at $8,482 per child, and that this is 28 percent below the national average of $11,824. But did you know that when we compare two schools within the same community, we can often find surprising results?

Take an elementary school in the Palo Alto Unified School District, for example. There, one school spends $7,925 per child. Yet, an elementary school only two miles away in East Palo Alto, served by the Ravenswood City School District, has a per-pupil expenditure of $4,794. The East Palo Alto school receives only 60% of what the Palo Alto school receives.  What does this mean for our students?

Funding impacts student achievement

Many resources reliant on funding have significant impact on student achievement, such as the quality of curriculum materials, specialist or tutoring supports, class size, and other factors that affect learning. Even nearly 10 years after the landmark Williams’ Settlement in our state, schools with the highest numbers of Latino and African-American students and students from families living in poverty have the biggest shortages of textbooks and attend the state’s most overcrowded schools. Just as students need resources to learn, teachers also need resources to teach–basic tools such as books, labs, libraries, clean facilities and healthy working conditions.

In some schools, funding enables them to employ counselors or social workers who are available to address serious behavior or family problems. In many under-resourced schools these resources are not present or are dependent upon sporadic funding. A teacher who works in a well-resourced school with consistent specialist supports may appear to be more effective than one whose students do not receive these supports.

The background

Last year, California ranked 47th and the year prior, 43rd in per-pupil expenditures.  It is widely agreed that the decline in funding began with the passing of Proposition 13, the property tax measure that limited funds to most schools and provided even less money to schools that needed it most. If prop 13 was intended to eliminate disparities in funding schools within the state, then it has clearly failed.

The interesting backdrop for us in California is the Williams Case (Eliezer Williams vs. State of California, et al.), which guaranteed equal access to instructional materials, safe schools, and quality teachers for all students. The case illustrated that California’s was a separate and unequal system of education—despite federal programs intended to better support the most challenged student populations.

Projected increases in funding are not enough

The Californian Department of Finance is projecting an increase of $2,700 in per-student funding by 2016-17. Still, that increase will fall short of the current national average. It is likely that other states will also increase their spending over the same time period and overall, the result will be little change in California’s ranking. Resource differences may individually have only a small discernible impact on a teacher’s apparent effectiveness; but cumulatively, they have much greater significance on student outcomes.

What can we do?

Certainly, all students are impacted by reductions in funding; however, students living in poverty, students of color, and English Language Learners, will continue to have even less access to the same educational resources as their wealthier and White peers. This is true in California  and across the United States (see the 2009 McKinsey Study on the Economic Impacts of the Achievement Gap).

Therefore, if we want to wholeheartedly celebrate some recent successes in closing the achievement gap in California, there needs to be a truly equity-based funding system. A system based on the actual cost of providing essential resources, with adjustments for cost differences in schools serving different communities and students, is perhaps what is required.

With the recent release of Academic Performance Index (API) and California Standards Test (CST) data, there has been a wave of press releases and news articles talking about student achievement results. Notable is the mention that in almost every subject and at almost every grade level broken down by targeted subgroups, scores have risen.

However, the achievement gap still remains. Significant gaps for Latino and African-American students are evident in virtually every measure of achievement, as are gaps between low-income and higher-income students.

Failure to achieve in school has lifetime consequences for students of color and students living in poverty. As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan describes, “State and local governments are overwhelmed by social costs directly linked to our shortcomings in the classroom—whether it is prisons, welfare, other social services or simply the lower lifetime earnings of people who lack the education needed to compete in the global economy.”

But closing the achievement gap is possible and progress is being made right here in San Francisco.

“What is going on at Everett? It used to be one of our schools that really struggled with hiring teachers, now there are dozens of candidates for each vacancy.  Unlike the past, we even have teachers wanting to transfer from within the District to teach there.”

- Scott Gaiber, Director of Recruitment and Human Capital Support, SFUSD

The Story of Everett Middle School

In years past, Everett had been a low-performing school. In 2010, less than one in five students were meeting grade level standards in Language Arts, and only one in ten were proficient in mathematics. Student engagement was low, and in 2008 alone there were 79 suspensions.  Teachers worked in isolation with few opportunities to collaborate or receive support.

Richard Curci (pronounced “kur-chi”) started as principal at Everett around the same time the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) identified Everett as one of California’s persistently low-performing schools (based on its CST scores).  To help facilitate better results, SFUSD brought in Partners in School Innovation. Our approach was to work with the leaders and teachers to create a plan for transforming the school and for accelerating student achievement.  The collaboration focused on building results-oriented leaders, putting in systems to support teachers and developing the core instructional program that would be needed to create a thriving place for teachers to teach and students to learn.

Effective Partnership Closes the Gap

Partners identified a team with extensive experience to support the change. Key to the success was the appointment of two School Innovation Partners (SIPs) who helped Curci and his team ensure they were set up for success. Both SIPs had extensive middle school teaching experience—one was previously an assistant principal; and the other an instructional math coach.

Curci and the SIPs also developed a clear vision of the teachers they needed to have to transform the school. Together, they recruited a team of people who had demonstrated excellence working in underserved schools; people who practiced standards-based teaching and, crucially, had a data focus underlying their approach.

At the beginning of the partnership, a review was conducted to assess the current capacity of the school and to identify strengths to build upon.  This included observing classes and interviews across the leadership team, teachers and coaches. These findings (in combination with the CST results) were then used to set goals collectively, create a vision, and develop a detailed action plan.  The plan focused on supporting leaders to gain clarity on their roles and responsibilities in leading school transformation and on monitoring both student achievement and instructional practice to ensure the plan was working.

Partners’ team further worked with Curci to systematically support teachers.  Success meant providing time for teachers to collaborate with their colleagues, facilitated professional development sessions, and ensuring that teachers had access to instructional coaching resources. Partners’ staff played a key role assisting in the implementation of an ongoing system of school monitoring.

The collaboration among the transformation leaders from Partners, Everett Middle School and SFUSD was essential to breakthrough student achievement results.

“Partners has been a driving and supportive force that has helped to turn our school around on multiple levels. We are a stronger Professional Learning Community thanks to them.”

- Richard Curci, Principal, Everett Middle School

Great Gains All Around

CST results were a key measure of the success of our partnership with Everett.

After the first year of engagement, CST scores saw an increase in those who were Proficient or Advanced in English Language Arts. Students went from 17.9% to 24.2%. In Mathematics, students went from 12.3% to 18.4%.

The second year saw the hard work validated with a significant growth in student achievement:

• In 2011-12 Everett achieved the highest growth of any middle school in SFUSD,  going from 639 to 693 (54-point growth) on the API.
• Everett experienced exceptional growth in the percentage of students moving into the Proficient and Advanced bands on the CST-ELA, at three-and-a-half times the state rate for middle schools.
• The percentage of students scoring Proficient or Advanced on the CST-Algebra 1 rose 14.2 percentage points, over 7 times the state rate of Algebra 1 grow, which was only 2.0 points.
• It was found that in less than two years that student capability had increased a grade level or more. The student level of engagement had also significantly increased.

The year also saw the emergence of a new kind of culture, one driven by leadership and teacher teams using data to help drive student achievement.

“Working with Partners has catapulted our school forward. By supporting communication, the use of data and constant reflection amongst the school leadership team members, Partner’s work has been transformative.”

- Lena Van Haren, Assistant Principal, Everett Middle School

Furthermore, the school’s assessments showed the attendance rate had increased. Student and staff satisfaction survey responses reflected an upward trend.  It was also in this year that Richard Curci was recognized as Principal of the Year by the Unified Administrators of San Francisco.

Sustainability and the Future

Now in its third year as a turnaround school, Everett is poised for tremendous growth. The work with Partners is being designed to ensure that when our partnership ends, the impact continues.

Today, Everett boasts a strong core instructional program and an integrated system for professional learning, helping all teachers deliver excellent instruction.  Underpinning this is the ability of the leadership to focus on student outcomes and align school resources, structures and ways of working to achieve their goals.

There is now also a mindset that holds collaboration as a core value. And the school culture is one where everyone, from staff to parents, believes that every student, no matter what their background, can succeed. Most importantly, there are now more students in the classroom engaged in learning and achieving at higher levels than ever before.

Congratulations to our friends and partners at Everett Middle School!

In 2011, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “High-quality Early Childhood Education programs are arguably the best investment our country can make.”  One of the plenary sessions at last week’s Clinton Global Initiative was “The Early Years: An Irresistible Investment Opportunity.” While the focus of the session was mainly on early childhood education in developing countries, it reminds us that there is significant change needed right here at home.

The key message from the session was that starting children on the right path in life with a high-quality education has one of the highest social returns on investment. Some studies have estimated that for every dollar invested, the benefits to society are as great as 17-fold. This is so because high-quality early childhood education programs develop the foundation upon which critical workforce skills are built—skills that boost economic growth and reduce long-term social costs, such as when students unprepared for the job market fall back on unemployment or other publicly supported assistance programs.

For example, a National Institutes of Health study published in December 2011 followed participants from Chicago-based, federally funded Child-Parent Centers until age 26 to find out how their participation in the program paid off. It was found that each dollar spent on these programs generates $4 to $11 in societal return, both because children who completed the program finished high school or college, earning more than their peers, and also because participants were less likely to be held back, arrested, depressed, involved with drugs or sick.

A complementary study by McKinsey & Company titled, “The economic impact of the achievement gap in America’s schools,” found that the underutilization of human potential as reflected in the achievement gap is also extremely costly. Existing gaps impose the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession—one substantially larger than the recession out of which the country is currently climbing. Additionally, this research shows that an achievement gap in kindergarten will only tend to widen throughout the school years. Children who enter school behind their peers, therefore, are unlikely to ever catch up, resulting in a persistent achievement gap.

For individuals, avoidable shortfalls in academic achievement impose heavy and often tragic consequences. These can include lower earnings, poor health and higher rates of incarceration than the average person with skills on grade level when graduating from high school. The McKinsey report estimates that closing the gap in the U.S. between White students and their African-American and Latino peers could increase annual GDP by as much as an additional $525 billion, or about 4%.

High-quality early childhood education clearly improves the school and life readiness of children, with direct benefits to society. In short, it can be argued that investments in early childhood education have the best chance of equalizing the playing field, helping to ensure that all children reach their full potential on the way to greater social equity. It is an early investment that will yield lifelong gains for us all.

WATCH: Byron Auguste from McKinsey & Company discusses how the achievement gap in US schools affects the economy.

In August 2012, Phi Delta Kappan and Gallup released findings from their 44^th annual survey, The Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. The survey serves as an annual barometer of American attitudes toward public education. This year’s findings show that Americans are united in some perceptions of public education while remaining divided in others.

Although in this election season we are constantly being reminded that we may remain a nation divided along many important parameters, this report reveals one consistent truth: there is considerable consensus around the fact that ensuring the best possible educational experience for all children is a high priority. According to an overwhelming but unsurprising 97% of respondents, the quality of urban schools and schooling must be improved.  A majority of Americans also believe that all children can thrive if they are provided with the appropriate supports, with nearly 90% of respondents indicating that it is important to work towards closing the achievement gap that exists when African-American and Latino student performance is compared to White and Asian student performance. It is critical to highlight that our ability to remain globally competitive and to create the future we envision for our children’s children clearly depends on our public schools improving.

These perceptions not only represent an incredible consensus about public education held by citizens of our country; they resonate with those of us who are working tirelessly to transform low-performing urban schools.  The faith in all kids being able to learn at high levels, coupled with the good news that 84% of respondents believe the achievement gap can be narrowed substantially while maintaining high standards for all children, is very gratifying and instills new hope and optimism.

However, in order to achieve this longstanding goal of decreasing the achievement gap, additional supports for our much challenged and often maligned public schools are necessary. One of these potential supports comes in the form of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English language arts and math. Three-quarters of respondents in the report believe that the CCSS will improve the consistency in the quality of public education. Given that 45 states and the District of Columbia have signed on to roll out the CCSS over the next several years, the American public should soon be able to determine if the effect of higher standards on a truly national scale results in similarly scaled results for all students.  But standards alone are insufficient to move our most challenged communities to higher levels of achievement. Significant resources are needed and there is a surprising consensus reflected about this issue in the poll results.

Money Matters

While a large majority of respondents hold an optimistic view of the possibility of American urban education, they also demonstrated a very strong sense of what is standing in the way of realizing that view—money.  When asked about the biggest problem that public schools face, the most common answer given was lack of financial support. It is no accident that a strong relationship exists between low student achievement and lack of school resources.

When schools are expected to do more with less, as is most often the case in our urban public schools in communities heavily impacted by poverty, the students themselves pay the price. Americans know just how important money is to our cash-strapped urban schools, and nearly 2/3 of respondents agreed that they would pay higher taxes in order to achieve better schools.

These data, against a backdrop of public campaigns that have slammed the national investment in our schools as too much money for too little learning messaged in films like “Waiting for Superman” among others, evince a resilience in the public will when investing even more dollars in a better future for our kids is concerned.

What We Together Can Do

The American public agrees that the achievement gap can be closed if we invest more in our struggling urban public schools and are willing to pay more taxes to do so. Educators, on the other hand, do not agree on exactly how additional resources should best be put to use.

With some additional clarifications and notes on the recommendations offered by the poll authors, Partners in School Innovation wholeheartedly agrees with their three basic ideas:

• Provide increasingly rigorous training to pre-service teachers.

We would extend this training to include all teachers and leaders and not just the pre-service or novices in the field. In addition, we would we recommend that we move to implement with more urgency and increased resources in the communities with greatest need and lowest performance.  Too often, we take a one-size-fits-all approach to allocating resources, leaving behind the most under-resourced and instead helping those most ready to take advantage of such offerings.

• Proceed with the Common Core State Standards rollout nationwide.

Too many communities are considering the Common Core implementation as just another adoption of standards or curriculum.  In addition to applying the necessary pressures to bring all states on-board with these standards, we believe it necessary to also increase communication and support around just what teaching in this more rigorous and adaptive manner means to educators at all levels.  Towards this end, the colleges and universities that prepare our educators must be a critical target of intervention, and all necessary incentives needed for them to retool their programs should be provided accordingly.

• Work to eliminate the achievement gap without lowering expectations for students. 

While certainly maintaining high expectations for all students is critical, it is surprising to find that even those with such expectations for kids have amazingly low expectations of the adults who teach them.  We would advocate an effort that underscores high expectations for everyone in the public education enterprise.  From parents, who are our students’ first teachers, all the way to Superintendents, too much of our current discourse is focused on teachers who are important but far from the only input into a child’s success.

Each and every one of us should engage in dynamic and transparent continuous improvement processes where we become increasingly accountable to one another for moving students individually and collectively forward at a rate that would achieve our goals.

An American consensus with such positive expectations for closing the achievement gap and willingness to contribute to greater results for our schools and students represents an opportunity that must not be missed in this highly politicized election climate.   Regardless of who resides at the White House after these elections, the results of this poll, and the recommendations therein provide a clear mandate to break through the beltway gridlock and move with urgency to improve public education from Washington D.C. all the way to the classroom.

A recent op-ed by Michael S. Roth in the New York Times asks who wants to attend school to learn to be “human capital”? Roth applies some of John Dewey’s perspective on education to the  March 2012 Council on Foreign Relations’ Independent Task Force report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security in order to tie learning to something larger than economic inputs: freedom.

“Human capital will determine power in the current century, and the failure to produce that capital will undermine America’s security,” the report states. “Large, undereducated swaths of the population damage the ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct diplomacy, and grow its economy.”

Roth argues that “these problems, however urgent, should not cause us to neglect Dewey’s insight that learning in the process of living is the deepest form of freedom.” He says, “The key is to develop habits of mind that allow students to keep learning, even as they acquire skills to get things done. This combination will serve students as individuals, family members and citizens—not just as employees and managers.”

There is no doubt that public education lies at the intersection of American democracy and economic prosperity. Developing public schools, therefore, that enable all children—inclusive of those currently set up to fall within the “uneducated swaths of the population”—to learn at high levels creates both economic vibrancy and the citizen leaders of tomorrow.

Read the full article here.

Partners in School Innovation’s approach to education reform is underscored by a belief that measures of reach and engagement as put forward by the Omidyar Network are necessary but not sufficient to apply to the public education enterprise.

In an article written for a supplement of the Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled “Learning from Silicon Valley: How the Omidyar Network uses a venture capital model to measure and evaluate effectiveness,” Matt Bannick and Eric Hallstein describe how their approach to measurement and evaluation stems from the company’s investment model.  The Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm whose fundamental belief is that people are basically good, and given the opportunity, they will improve their lives.  They fund organizations that utilize the power of markets to create opportunities for individuals and who have the capacity for large-scale social change.

The Omidyar Network argues that market-based signals of effectiveness are of highest value to non-profits because they provide immediate feedback that help leaders prioritize activities.  In other words, if a customer is willing to pay for a service or product, then one can assume it is a valuable service or product.  This can apply to the education reform field in that high demand for a specific approach to school transformation indicates that schools and school systems value that approach.

In evaluating the effectiveness of the organizations that they fund, the Omidyar Network requires two broad measures, reach and engagement.  Reach is the number of individuals touched by a product or service.  Engagement is the depth of that interaction between service and individual.  Together, a combination of reach and engagement measures tailored to each organization serve as proxies for predicting long-term impact on society.

The Omidyar Network found that requiring organizations to collect additional measures of impact often proved time-consuming and costly, while reach and engagement are units that are typically measured during the normal course of operation.  The Omidyar Network argues that spending too much time gathering evidence of impact takes away from the activities an organization should prioritize in order to have maximum impact.

For Partners in School Innovation, reach and engagement are indeed crucial measures of the organization’s effectiveness.  The organization’s measure of reach is the number of schools with which we partner, the number and location of school districts with which we partner, and even the numbers of school staff with whom we work directly.

One measure of engagement includes the level of service we provide. This can range from intensive, multi-year partnerships as much as 3 days a week on campus, to a one-time day-long network session involving multiple participants from various schools.  Indeed, the number of schools or people that Partners serves and their level of engagement indicate to the organization the market value or demand for our approach.  These are measures that require no additional work and provide immediate feedback about the needs of those we serve.

The Omidyar Network offers that, “In rapidly changing markets…truly game-changing innovations will emerge from entrepreneurs who are empowered to identify changing situations and rapidly adapt their organizations”.  This belief certainly applies to the rapidly changing and highly political field of education. The question then is whether this market-based approach to measurement and evaluation fully applies to education, a field that is not historically market-based.  And is it enough to know how many people we serve and how engaged they are in our service or product? Should the investment also be made to measure impact, and at what level of effort before such becomes more costly than the value that can be derived from it?

An example that comes to mind is the federally-funded Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE, program founded in 1983.  Ask anyone in their 30s today about DARE and they will likely remember the local police officer who visited their classroom to talk about the dangers of drugs.  DARE has exhibited signs of success indicated by reach and engagement.  DARE staff claim that it is currently being implemented in 75% of American school districts.  Municipalities and states continue to engage with DARE and fund it.  Using Bannick and Hallstein’s logic, DARE has demonstrated reach and shown that engagement is strong.

However, in 1998, DARE did not meet federal guidelines of effectiveness and ever since has been prohibited from receiving government funding.  Studies conducted by the California Department of Education and the American Psychological Association found that few students were swayed by the anti-drug education offered and that illegal substance use rates remained unchanged after completion of the program.  DARE continues to enjoy high levels of reach and engagement in American school culture.  However, if they measured impact only in terms of reach and engagement, they would not have noticed that behavior was not changing.

For Partners in School Innovation, it is clear to us that reach and engagement are merely starting points for measuring what is important about our work to transform the lowest performing schools so that all students thrive.  In our industry, reach and engagement are often easily determined by data sources that, as in the case of DARE, can miss the ultimate and more meaningful data that reveal evidence of impact.  When so much is at stake, we would argue that it is absolutely necessary to take the time and effort required to measure the results obtained by any service provided, and not just the service’s reach or the market’s engagement with it.

Luckily, in the field of education, student achievement measures, while not perfect measures of the education system, are widely available to give us some sense of our impact on student outcomes.  Combined with other measures of impact, such as increases in school leadership skills, teacher collaboration systems, and improvements in instruction, we can more confidently make a link from our work to student achievement and not distract from our strategic priorities as an organization.   So, while market-based measures of impact, like reach and engagement, may speak to how efficiently an organization operates, the bottom line is still that we must ensure measurable impact on students—and ultimately their opportunities for success.

Dr. Tina Trujillo, Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley (and a former evaluation specialist and district partnership director at Partners), recently published a commentary in Teachers College Record, titled The Paradoxical Logic of School Turnarounds: A Catch-22. In it, she provides a powerful critique of current federal policies governing school turnaround. The crux of her argument is that the main driver of federal turnaround policy—drastic and immediate change of leadership and teaching staff—actually serves to perpetuate conditions linked to low performance such as high turnover, inexperienced teaching staff and poor school climate.

Dr. Trujillo’s argument is compelling largely for her examination of similar reforms in the education and corporate sectors, which suggest that had architects of the current federal turnaround policy actually paid attention to the outcomes of these efforts, they might have written a different policy.

For example, in industry, turnaround strategies may give the perception of increased innovation, but they often do not deliver on their promise of increased productivity. Similarly, Dr. Trujillo shows that the school reconstitution trend of the early 2000s didn’t work.

This earlier reform strategy sought to enhance the stock of individuals in schools by replacing (or threatening to replace) large percentages of a school’s administrators, teachers, and support staff with people thought to be more capable and committed.  Trujillo notes that reconstitution, instead of providing a solution, rather led to greater instability among staff, with demoralized teachers being replaced by teachers only of similar quality. It seems that schools had tremendous trouble finding enough highly-qualified staff to populate the massive vacancies created by school turnaround. Thus, despite the great effort expended for reconstitution efforts, these schools continued to be low-performing.

In the vein of Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22 then, Trujillo states that current school turnaround policy is somewhat akin to selling chocolate-covered cotton: it gives the appearance of great promise, but there is little of substance when one digs below the surface.  For schools receiving federal School Improvement Grants, we are left wondering what will happen when the money disappears.

One possible solution may be to provide the teachers and administrators in our lowest-performing schools with the tools they need to engage in substantive turnaround where they currently work. A bright spot of the current federal turnaround policy is providing numerous supports for our struggling schools. These supports could be used to build administrator and teacher capacity and efficacy in order to make and sustain the change our students so desperately need. If the teachers and administrators in our lowest-performing schools receive this support, they might be able to generate and sustain improved student achievement.

Of course, this could create an exciting Catch-22 situation all its own:  with a law designed to turn around chronically low-performing schools, there are no low-performing schools left to turn around.

 Dr. Trujillo comments,

I wrote this article because I wanted to communicate the specific ways in which our current educational policies, namely, those that mandate school “turnarounds” for our nation’s lowest performing schools, rest on faulty, unwarranted claims. These policies disregard what rigorous, empirical research teaches us about the reconstitution of school staff as a school reform strategy: not only does it not improve performance, it actually recreates the exact conditions that research links with persistent low performance—high turnover, instability, poor climate, inexperienced teachers, and racial and socioeconomic segregation.

The policy presents schools targeted for turnaround with impossible dilemmas, or catch-22s, because its reforms lead schools back to the original problems that they are supposed to solve. Like the policies in Heller’s novel, turnaround reforms create the outward appearance of well-intentioned policy makers, but they do nothing to address fundamental systemic inequities in funding or resources – the conditions research has shown over and over to have huge effects on school performance.

At the end of the day, the current turnaround policy and others like it distract the public from more fundamental questions about the types of reforms that genuinely challenge the status quo by securing the necessary conditions for all students to succeed. And that’s the conversation I’d like to see policymakers, practitioners, and community members have when they talk about reform and turning around our most struggling schools.